The Fake-State Liturgy — “The Republic’s Defence Authorities”

Count the nouns. In 1,085 items from the Luhansk Well, the same nouns recur, hour by hour, year after year: the Republic. The People’s Militia. The People’s Council. The LPR Defence Authorities. The Ministry of State Security. These are not descriptions. They are a liturgy.

What a Liturgy Does

A liturgy is what the Church does on Sunday morning. It is not primarily communication. It is a performative act — the words make the thing real by the act of speaking them. This is my body. This is the Republic.

The worshipper who hears the phrase becomes a believer not because they are persuaded, but because the repetition changes what they perceive as normal.

The Three Moves

Move 1 — The Institutional Name

Never “the militants.” Never “the armed group.” Always “the People’s Militia.” The adjective People’s is a direct theft from Soviet iconography — the Supreme Soviet, the People’s Court, the People’s Commissariat. It connects the LPR, in the listener’s unconscious, to the whole memory-architecture of the USSR. It archetypes the occupation as a continuation of something they once belonged to.

Move 2 — The Title

Never “Marochko said.” Always “the official representative of the LPR People’s Militia, Major Andrei Marochko, said.” The rank, the role, the institution — all incanted every time. A magician’s repetition. The listener absorbs, without thinking, the premise that there is an LPR, that it has a People’s Militia, that it has official representatives, that they hold ranks. Four fictions stacked into one grammatical subject.

Move 3 — The Counterpart

The liturgy always frames Ukraine as “Kiev” — a city, not a state. “Kiev forces.” “Kiev-controlled territory.” “Kiev denies.” This is the inverse move: while inflating the occupation into “the Republics,” it deflates Ukraine into a single municipality. The fake state becomes weightier than the real one, grammatically.

What It Accomplishes

The liturgy produces, in the minds of the occupied population, the thing it claims to describe. The longer they hear “the Republic” every day, the more real the Republic becomes — not as a fact on the ground, but as cognitive furniture. It takes its place next to “the weather” and “the weekend.” It becomes unremarkable. Once unremarkable, it is almost unchallengeable.

The Counter — Refuse the Liturgy

Never repeat their nouns. Not “the LPR” — “the Russia-occupied part of Luhansk province.” Not “the People’s Militia” — “the armed Russian-backed militia.” Not “the Republic’s defence authorities” — “the Russian occupation administration.”

Each correction is small. Cumulatively, they drain the spell.

Liturgies work by repetition. So do counter-liturgies.

The Fake-State Liturgy — 'The Republic's Defence Authorities'